Deeds to Habit
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Islamic Meditation Practices
Dr. Rania Awaad describes the three R's of meditation and how we can apply Islamic meditation practices to our daily lives.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Wasalamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salam ajma'in. Most people say that they want to have a deeper spiritual connection with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, but they don't really know how, or they feel like it's too far out of reach. Others might hear about yoga and meditation and how they have a really great effect on our mental well-being and health, and want to implement it in their lives, but they can't really seem to be consistent with it. And others yet have that small voice in the back of their mind that says, is our meditation and yoga really in line with Islamic teachings and principles, or is there something that's actually from Islam itself directly that is contemplative meditation that we can actually integrate into our lives? So the good news is we actually have some really robust practices within Islam that are contemplative, meditative, and the good news is not only are they effective, but they're actually very easy to implement in our lives. One of my teachers in Syria would often say, and group these into three R's, retreat, reflect, and remember him often. And often when people think about the word retreat, the first word that comes to mind is Atikaf, or spiritual retreat. And when they think about Atikaf, three words come to mind, Ramadan, masjid, and men. But not every month of the year is Ramadan, and more than half of the population are not men, and currently our masjids are closed. So how do you actually keep up with the spiritual retreat if it's such a great effective practice in our deen? So the good news is for women, they can actually do Atikaf in their home, and for men and women both, when the masjid reopened, they can do Atikaf, but in the meantime, they can do an alternative called khalwa, or also spiritual seclusion or retreat, but you can have the flexibility of doing this anywhere and for any period of time.
And what do you do in a retreat is always the question, and other than prayer, reading Quran, dua, the other two R's become very important here, which is essentially to reflect and to remember him often. But first, before we go into details about those, let's talk about how it is we're going to make this something that's a daily habit in our lives, because it may still sound very fancy, and that we don't know how to actually implement it daily. So for someone like myself that juggles a lot on a daily basis, wears many hats, or should I say hijabs on a daily basis, efficiency is really important to me, but also a deep connection with Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And so I have found that actually tying the three R's to my daily prayers has made it actually something I'm able to do on a consistent basis every single day. Let's look at retreat. The teachers say that retreat is the i'tikaf, this concept of khalwa i'tikaf is like the pressure cooker, that if you have so many stresses and difficulties every single day in our lives, and if we don't have the safety valve that allows the steam to escape, that pressure cooker will explode. And so the i'tikaf or retreat becomes a necessity in our lives. And the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ was to do i'tikaf not only in Ramadan, he would do that consistently every single Ramadan, particularly in the last 10 until the year he passed away ﷺ, but it was also his sunnah and habit to do i'tikaf year round. And the way to do this is to tie it to your prayers. So for me, if I'm praying at home, before I enter into my prayer space as a woman, I make my intention for i'tikaf and I begin. And for a man or woman, they can make the intention of khalwa, right, which is not the same as i'tikaf, but you get the same concept of spiritual retreat. And when you raise your hands up to say Allahu Akbar and throw your hands up, you throw all of the dunya behind your shoulders and you dialogue directly with Allah ﷻ with no intercessor in between.
And after you're done with your prayer, you do the second R, which is tathakkur, or doing dhikr of Allah ﷻ. SubhanAllah, alhamdulillah, la ilaha illallah, Allahu Akbar, istighfar, Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammad. There's so many forms of dhikr you can do. Then the third R, which is basically to remember Him often or to contemplate constantly. And the way you do this is actually just taking a moment of your time and thinking about the greatness of Allah ﷻ, thinking about all the blessings in your lives, thinking about everything that could have been or would have not been without His decree, and thinking about the people in your lives and thinking about how like the hadith of Qudsi says, that if all the people were to gather to harm you in some way, they could not, except by the will of Allah. And if all the people were to gather to help you in some way, they also could not, except by the will of Allah. The pens have been lifted and the ink has dried. And when you focus in this way, everything shifts back into reality and things that we enlarge in our minds shrinks back to actual size. And then we realize how much we need to depend on Allah ﷻ and it brings things back into focus for us. And that is why the retreat is so highly prized and something that the Prophet ﷺ would do daily. So if you do what I do and recommend, inshallah, of tying this practice, these three R's into your five daily prayers, even if it was 10 to 15 minutes of your five daily prayers, that's a full hour of contemplative, meditative retreat that you might not have realized you're already able to do very easily and consistently in Ramadan and outside of it year-round. And when you have the extra time and the luxury of time to spend more hours in this, and in this way, I hope for me and for you, it's written as a daily consistent habit that is not broken and is something that's written for us on the Day of Judgment
as goodness that we need to take into Jannah. BarakAllahu feekum. This is your sister Dr. Rania Awad signing off. As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-rahmatullāhi wa-barakātuh.
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